4 essential call tracking metrics you should be measuring

Matt McGillicuddy

By Matt McGillicuddy
14 Aug 2024


7 min read

Contents

How many calls flow through your call centre daily? Are these calls from new customers or returning ones? How did they discover your services? If you're keen to boost your contact centre's performance, monitoring the key call tracking metrics will provide you with a clear roadmap for improvement.

Call tracking enables you to take a closer look at where your calls are coming from. In addition to that, it provides you with data that will enhance your call centre operations, your sales strategy, and the overall customer experience you deliver.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the essential call tracking metrics you need to be measuring, from volume and duration to scoring.

What are the key call tracking metrics?

Call tracking metrics are the most effective way of monitoring and measuring the performance of your contact centres. Here are some of the key ones you need to pay attention to if you want to take your contact centre to the next level:

  • Call volume: This tells you how many calls your call centre is receiving every day and where those calls are coming from. Call volume is also important to track for outbound calls, which helps you unlock the other half of the customer journey. Call tracking software does this for you automatically.
  • First-time callers: When someone calls your centre for the first time, it's key to track these interactions and understand what prompted their call. Gaining a thorough insight into the needs and wants of your first-time callers enables you to customise your scripts and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
  • Sales calls vs. service calls: It’s likely your call centre receives a mix of both sales calls and service calls from customers old and new. You need to understand what drives these calls and what is being said, to help you optimise the experience. Use this information to tailor scripts, reduce AHT, and improve the online experience if there are common, recurring queries.
  • Conversion rate: This tracks the percentage of people who make a purchase on the call. Tracking conversion rate shows how effective your agents are at converting leads and other actions such as upselling and increasing average order value. Conversation Analytics helps you lift the lid on what happens on every call your agents make and take, so you can easily spot which calls had positive outcomes.
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What are the benefits of tracking call metrics?

Call tracking metrics will help you stay on track with your business objectives and ultimately, will help your business grow. But there are several other benefits of call tracking that you should consider.

Map the customer journey: Customer journey mapping aims to understand intentions, motivations, and pain points. With call tracking, identify common trends in your customer journey, highlight FAQs that delay conversions, and understand what turns a ‘ring-ring’ into ‘kerching’!

Refine your customer-facing communications: Understanding the reasons why customers choose your service reveals valuable insights into potential opportunities and risks. This intel can then be utilised to refine agent scripts and upgrade self-service tools, making your communications more compelling and effective.

Streamline call centre data collection and analysis: If you’re looking to get started with call tracking, you need to make sure it’ll slot neatly into your existing tech stack. Streamlining data and ensuring it all ends up in the same place makes it easier to extract insights and make data-driven decisions on areas of improvement.

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What are the essential call tracking metrics you should be measuring?

You can unlock a wealth of insight with call tracking metrics that will make your operations more effective than ever. By developing a clear understanding of why your customers are calling, you can highlight which interactions lead to conversions, train your agents to deflect low-value leads, and pinpoint FAQs to improve scripts and increase the number of successful calls.

What if you could take call tracking metrics one step further and collect data that shines a spotlight on what your customers want? With Conversation Analytics, you can enhance the customer experience by monitoring what actually happens on those calls. So, let’s get stuck in and take a look at the metrics you should be measuring.

Call volume

Call volume tells you how many calls your call centre receives every day. More importantly, with call tracking, where those calls are coming from. For example, if you’re able to see the number of calls marketing campaigns generate to accurately track ROI. Call volume is also important to track for outbound calls your sales team make to gain visibility over the entire customer journey.

How do you track call volume?

Tracking call volume is reliant on your agents and sales team diligently recording every call. Although this is doable, it's labour-intensive and it's subject to human error. Call tracking software automatically logs both inbound and outbound calls for you. Furthermore, it provides high-quality analysis to give you better visibility on how your agents drive successful call outcomes.

First-time callers

First impressions count. If a customer or a lead has picked up the phone for the first time, you want to be able to track those calls and understand what drove it. A clear understanding of who your first-time callers are and what they need will enable you to tailor your scripts and create a stellar customer experience. Also, if you know where they came from thanks to call tracking, you can deep dive into the keywords that brought them, the landing pages they viewed, and which campaigns are delivering those calls.

How to track first-time callers?

Connecting offline interactions with the online customer journey is tricky you’ll need to have call tracking software in place. If you want to gain insight into a first-time caller’s journey, you need to track their journey from end to end. With Infinity, tracking first-time callers is as simple as one-two-three:

A different telephone number is assigned to each unique visitor on the website. When a visitor calls the unique number their user data is recorded, and call tracking links the call to the visitors' digital activity.

This connection gives you a complete view of the caller’s journey, so you can tell what they've been browsing, what products they may be interested in, and which campaigns, channels and keywords drove their call.

Essentially, call tracking merges phone call data with the visitor’s digital activity. As a result, you get the full picture of the customer journey meaning you can make smarter decisions.

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Sales calls vs. service calls

You likely receive a mix of sales calls and service calls from both new and existing customers. To manage these efficiently and deliver exceptional customer experiences, it's crucial to understand the motivations behind these calls and the content of the conversations. Armed with this insight, you can begin to optimise the process by customising scripts and reducing Average Handling Time (AHT) by ensuring calls are directed to the right place.

Tracking sales calls vs. service calls

To understand the number of sales calls vs. service calls coming into your contact centre, your agents need to wrap categorising calls into their ACW process. That said, one of the most common issues in call centres is to ensure that your agents are a) completing activity codes and b) assigning the correct activity code. With tools like Conversation Analytics, outcomes are automatically assigned.

Conversion rates

Conversion rate is a metric linked directly to lead generation and revenue. It tracks the percentage of people who make a purchase on the call. Since a purchase may not happen during the first contact, you might prefer to track the number of warm leads that convert. If your business relies on phone calls to make sales, this is an important KPI. Tracking conversion rates shows how effective your agents are at converting leads. It also means you can pinpoint other revenue-driven actions such as upselling and increasing average order value.

Tracking conversion rates

There are a couple of ways you can track conversion rates. The first is a straightforward calculation where you divide the number of phone calls that led to conversions by the total number of phone calls received. If you want more accurate results, you can record initial interactions as warm leads and set a timeframe for conversion, then divide the number of conversions by the number of warm leads over time. Using Conversation Analytics enables you to see how your contact centre is performing without the manual work.

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